The Green Lantern’s power ring first appeared in All American Comics #16, July 1940 and throughout Superpower history, has often been referred to as the most powerful weapon in the universe. The only known limit to the power of this thing is the ring-bearer’s own will. Whatever the ring-wearer imagines, the ring will create.

If you’re looking for some life-giving force field that will let you fly (without the use of hallucinogens), travel through inhospitable environments (like Earth, or your local neighborhood), enter hyperspace (the parallel universe is no mystery to addicts and alcoholics…we’ve been living on another plane since the day we were born), look no further than your own belief system.

Your head (alcoholic or otherwise) is a highly advanced computer, and in spite of what you may think, you’re an incredible human being. You are at exactly the right place at the perfect time, and as a meditation I read each day says, you can never get it done, and never get it wrong. Look for what you want to see today, because what you look for is inevitably what you’re going to find.

The thing about the power ring (if you ever followed comics as a kid) is that it has to be worn to be effective, but if you find you’ve left your house today without this magical little contraption, fear not! At many times in Green Lantern history, the ring was summoned from a distance (even if someone else was wearing it!) So if someone has stolen your personal power this morning, just close your eyes and command it back.

By far, the most significant limitation of the power ring is the willpower of the wearer. In sobriety, that’s a little thing we call faith. It’s what you are willing to believe. Are you willing to believe this morning that a power greater than you can restore you to sanity, can remove unhealthy obsessions, can place you as an equal (not less than or more than) in the middle of your world…a safe place where you are busy with the work of living and where you are surrounded by the love and support of others?

It’s an incredible feeling to be one among…our weaknesses are only what we believe is not possible for us. If you (like the power ring) need a little recharging today, why not flex your prayer muscle a little. The first time I said the 3rd step prayer, it was with my sponsor and we got on our knees in my apartment. I found this awkward and unnecessary. But that’s not the point. Since then I’ve said the 3rd step prayer many times (and usually not on my knees) because it reflects what I am willing to have happen in my life today:

I offer myself (in other words…I’m here for you Universe.)

Build with me and do with me what YOU will. (This was–and sometimes still is–hard to say, mainly because I instinctively think that it’s going to be something I won’t like. I should clarify that this has not been the case. In 11 years, god’s (his/her/it’s/energy/superconscious) plan for me has always been better than mine.

Relieve me of the bondage of self (who cares that I’m getting relieved so I can better do a ‘higher calling’ …whatever! Just take it. Being in bondage sucks!)

Take away my difficulties (yes please! I’ll take 2nd servings on that one! And again, not an issue that it’s so I can be of more service. You know why that’s fine? Because I get to do a lot of cool stuff and it’s where I’m happiest, even though I rarely know that in the moment.)

May I do your will. I’m gonna be honest here. I don’t know who ‘your’ is. But I have a sense of the will. It’s love, service, patience, kindness. It’s softness in a crazy world. It’s fearlessness in the face of things that are just plain wrong. It’s a persistent faith in hope, goodness, mercy, redemption, evolution. Doing ‘your will’ for me is a spiritual practice. Back to the beginning. I’m never done. It’s never over.

Although I detest the word (confess) for all of its negative implications, there are few things more powerful along the road of a healthy happy life than getting real about the dirty.

The simple fact is that we are all human, flawed, and full of quirky little insecurities and fears that cause us to act out in all kinds of crazy ways. An addict knows better than most that for most of us, hurting each other isn’t an intentional thing. But it happens. Because when you come between me and a drink, you’re going to disappear. That’s the power of addiction. It’s also the power of overwhelming fear, frustration, boredom, rage, disappointment, resentment, ect., ect.

So we screw up…a lot! And by the time we get to AA or NA or some place where we run smack into the 8th & 9th step (all about amends) we have a pretty big list of wrongs to try and right. Those wrongs may cover everything from stealing food from 24-hour grocery stores to leaving our kid alone at home at an inappropriate age while we’re out doing whatever…

Hopefully, the people we have chosen to surround ourselves with in the program can give us some healthy perspective on exactly who and how we make amends. It’s a lot more than a casual ‘I’m sorry’ and an ‘all better now?’ To make amends requires a certain humility about the fact that our behaviour has impacted another person’s journey on the planet. And sometimes it’s really really hard, because you can’t necessarily make it right.

For example, I found myself temporarily homeless after I was asked to leave the very posh private university I somehow wormed my way into as a 17-year-old running wild all over Florida, I had a friend who was kind enough to offer me a couch for a month or so while I figured out what I was doing with my life (a revelation which would unfortunately not happen for another 12 years.) This friend was just doing what friends do. She was reaching out to a person in need and knowing of my troubled home life, trying to create a space for me in which I could be ‘ok’ again. Little did she know (and we play upon these people when we’re in active addiction) she was bumping into an alcoholic and a drug addict. It was legitimately unclear at the time. We were kids. She drank in a way that was very similar to the way I drank I used. The difference was, she didn’t flunk out of school, and when sleeping on her friend’s couch, she didn’t steal a very valuable camera that had been left to her friend by a dead grandmother. She didn’t take that camera and pawn it and then sneak away in the middle of the night without even a goodbye. She had no idea who she was dealing with.

So when we get here, we have a big list of this kind of stuff. Some of it is right in the forefront of our consciousness, and some of it is pushed further back into the recesses of our brains. But the longer we stay sober, and the more we pursue the redemption of a spiritual life, these wrongs will be revealed to us. Like the layers of an onion peeling away. Sometimes it makes you cry.

There was little I could do about the missing camera 13 or 14 years after I stole it when I finally had the guts to make amends. But the point is, I made the amends under the direction of a sponsor and I came clean about the dirty. Because of that, if I happen to be walking down the street in Orlando at some point and I come face to face with this girl, I won’t have to look away, to cross the street, to duck into an alley. Why? Because I have gone to her and righted this wrong in the most thorough and complete way I can. And to this day, if she calls me and asks me for something, if it’s in my power to help her, I will.

That’s how one early sponsor told me to evaluate whether or not I owed an ammends…if you run into the person on the street, face to face, will that feeling of shame creep up inside you? If you walk into a place (dozens of places !) you stole from or harmed in some way, will you instinctively lower your eyes…will you feel smaller?

Because we have had enough of that in our using lives…that feeling small, shamed, powerless, like an animal. As people on new footing and a new path, it’s time to make that right. Because the harms we have done others ultimately are harms we do ourselves. And because this step, this honest humble admission of our wrongs is a requirement for feeling like we belong at the banquet. When we can’t say we’re wrong, we can’t heal. When making a mistake threatens our perceived security, we’re not going to be likely to own it. The best part of being human is being able to say, yes, that’s who I am! I can be selfish, dishonest, critical, cynical. And I can also care too much, try to hard, give in the wrong ways. I am full of contradictions (as Walt Whitman said) because I am large! And when you know who you are, you don’t have to own anything you’re not.

Spiderman has undergone amazing transformations since his debut in 1962. His superhuman strength and ability to cling to almost any surface remind me of the sober alcoholic who is really practicing this thing. Known for his agility and amazing reflexes, Spiderman is a great example of what happens when we tune into our inner senses and prepare for whatever is coming next.

You may know (if you follow comics, or mainstream media) that in recent years, Spiderman has been reborn. That’s a reminder that we can and should always be actively improving ourselves. For me, that means refining what it is I think inspires my joy and creativity. Refining and refining and refining. And then….refining.

Because the truth is, I don’t always know what will make me happy. Mmmmm….let me rephrase. I almost NEVER know. I think I know. But if I’m not tuning into a power greater than myself, chances are I will achieve my intent (or some mutated version of it) only to find that I am still unhappy (aka: discontent, restless, bored, uninspired, empty, depressed, blah…you get the picture.)

It was like that back in 2000 when I was newly sober (for the 2nd time), newly married, a new homeowner and a new mother. I finally had almost all of things that were on my mental checklist for satisfaction. You have one of those, don’t you? Admit it! We ALL have that running around in our head. It’s that list of things that you ramp up and work towards achieving because you think that by checking each one of those off your list that giant hole inside you that screams ‘YOU ARE NOT ENOUGH’ will disappear. Incidentally, my checklist at the time involved driving a Volvo station wagon and getting a St. Bernard–both things I also achieved. I know, random, right?

The point is, I was sitting in the middle of it all and miserable. And there is nothing quite as miserable as sitting on your beautiful wood floors in your beautiful house, holding your perfect baby in your lap, with your giant St. Bernard panting behind you and your shiny Volvo parked in the driveway, and feeling miserable inside.

You really feel like a loser in that moment. Also, you feel scared to death. I recognized in that very intuitive moment, that I was incapable of figuring out what it would take to make me happy. I considered a divorce. I considered abandoning it all–including my child. I considered leaving. Because I had been sober a total of less than a thousand days (that included both sobrieties at the time) out of a lifetime of more than 10,000 days. And I didn’t have my sober superpowers back then. I only had my experience. I had what I came from–which was a world where everyone leaves. Where leaving is the first and only real solution. Cut and run. Fuck it.

That’s a really lonely way to live. I understand now what a painful trajectory that is for a life course. Thank god I had a sponsor at the time who suggested that instead of getting divorced and abandoning my child, I should show up to a park on Hazeltine Drive each morning at 6:45 and walk with her.

That did not seem like a solution to my problems at the time. Eleanor was 71 years old. Walking with her and her group of old lady friends each morning at the crack of dawn after having been up all night with a screaming baby did not FEEL like it was going to fix anything. But I had already been sober and gotten loaded once. And there was a part of me so desperate that I was willing to take direction. Also, I could not afford therapy at the time. So…there it is.

I would show up to the park with mascarra smeared under my eyes, in clothes covered in spit up and sometimes mismatched shoes (you have no idea how early you actually have to leave your house in Los Angeles to drive across the Valley and arrive anywhere by 6:45 in the morning.) I would haul all of my shit (baby stroller, bottles, diaper bags, yada yada) out of the back of my Volvo station wagon and drag it across the parking lot where those 3 old ladies would be standing and waiting for me. Then they would take the stroller and push my baby around the park and talk to her, and play with her and coo at her, and I would cry, complain, or just follow comatose behind them. I was so incredibly sick…and I say that, not as a joke, but with an unbelievable amount of compassion for who I was at that time.

I did that for more than a year. And guess what? I got better! It was my routine. I’m pretty sure it kept me sober, and married, and I know it kept me sane (or as sane as was possible.) And in that year, I learned that I don’t always know what I want. Sometimes I get things that I think I want and they suck, or the things that come with them suck. But that’s okay. It’s a part of it. Because sometimes I get things that I didn’t know I wanted, like the chance to create my family…one that doesn’t leave. And those things are amazing.

I have now been sober for thousands of days. And while it is still quite possible for me to end up scratching my head wondering how I got myself into something (metaphorically speaking) I no longer place quite the same value on either my ambitions or my achievements (now if I could only learn not to take my failures so seriously!) I am quite aware in some very deep place, that none of it changes any of it.

The part of me that screams, YOU ARE NOT ENOUGH, can only be silenced by some message more powerful. That message is: YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ENOUGH. You were enough from the moment you were born. There is nothing to prove. There is nowhere to go. There is nothing to do. Relax. Know that you are loved and all is well. And from a place of peace, a place of knowing that NONE OF IT WILL CHANGE ANY OF IT, ask yourself what inspires you, and dream.

I was going to go to yoga (at 6:37 a.m. this morning) and then I wasn’t going to go (by 7:04 a.m., as I frantically tried to find a reasonably clean pair of yoga pants.) By 7:13, it was on again, as I threw an old tank top on under an older t-shirt and tried to swoop up my day in my arms before hitting the road to drop the kids at school. It was hot yoga from 7-8:30, coffee with friend to celebrate her 40th birthday, lunch meeting at noon across town, then back to Lakeway for 3 shopping returns, 2 errands and a bathroom break. That was BEFORE picking up my kids, who got in the car screaming at each other and immediately started in with, we’re hungry, we’re thirsty, we want you to drop everything and pay attention to us right now.

Due to a fiercely intense yoga class (and my inability to get my shit together before I leave the house in the morning) I spent the entire day in a damp t-shirt that never dried, smelling my own sweat…but what the heck…it rained all day, so I would have stayed soaked anyway. I can only imagine what my lunch meeting thought as I walked in, frazzled, hair out to next year, after hoofing 3 blocks (due to horrific holiday parking) in the pouring rain.

After picking up the children and assuring them that a box labeled “5th Avenue” doesn’t guarantee a gift from the American Girl store in New York, more errands. And then home..where I assisted in cleaning a guinea pig cage, changing the cat liter box, washing a sink full of dishes, answering 17 student emails, making at least 6 separate snacks and meals over the course of 4 hours, vacuuming the entire house and hand-washing two filthy guinea pigs that were squealing and trying to get away from me the entire time. Oh, and let’s not forget the washing machine–I don’t even bother counting laundry as a chore anymore. It’s just kind of what I do–you know, when my eyes are open.

What’s the point? I don’t know. I don’t really have one. Nothing spiritual comes to mind at the moment. The world seems full of madness. So many people coming and going as if they exist alone, in some centrifugal spiral. You know what that means? Centrifugal force (from the Latin, centrum, meaning “center” and fugere, meaning, “to flee,”)represents the effects of inertia (non-movement) as it arises in connection with rotation. Fleeing the center! I sort of picture Frozone, suspended in mid-air and waiting for rescue.

But I’m no superhero. Quite the opposite. The home room mother of 1st grade (I think I’ve written about her before on this blog), now she’s a force to be reckoned with! One of the women who came to the birthday coffee party this morning–she made HANDMADE truffles, in a pink baker’s box. They had personalized little tags in them that said things like: 40 & Fabulous. They were white frosted with pink stripes. Some had glitter. Jesus.

I want to make fun of the home room mom. A year ago, six months ago, yesterday, I would have. But today I realized that they have something I want a little more of. They have this immaculate attention to detail. My husband has it as well. First semester at the University of Texas, Austin…full-time student, dad, husband, sober, running two small businesses and remodeling a kitchen–straight As! Who can do that?

I’m feeling not enough today. Like I wish I was a little more…capable, important, together, presentable (the sweaty yoga t-shirt…that was really bad!) But I am what I am. And I have to love that today I left my house at 7:17 a.m. and I stayed out all day, keeping my commitments, showing up (in spite of how I looked) and hooking into the good stuff in life–my friends, and my family, and my well-being. There was a time in my life when I couldn’t get out of the closet. And I never forget that that’s where I come from. My perfectionism will be the death of me. It’s a defect. And sooner or later it will eat my lunch.

Some days, the best you can hope for is midnight, and an uninterrupted night’s sleep.

So I pulled around the corner in my neighborhood one Sunday afternoon and found this sign, hand-crafted by JM (and a little reminiscent of his former days as a tagger on the streets of Los Angeles) attached to the front of my house.

LOVE!

It now hangs in my garage where at least once a day, it reminds me of the things I most care about.

Te amo, por vida…I LOVE YOU FOR LIFE, is another way of saying, I’m in–100% in. So let’s do this thing. Minute by minute, day by day, let’s map out what feels good. Let’s go with what works and let’s QUICKLY get rid of what isn’t working in each moment. Notice I said quickly, right? Because we can spend a lifetime mulling around in the BS. And we’ve wasted enough time, haven’t we?

If you expect to have an extraordinary life, you have to be willing to KILL YOUR BABIES. It’s a writing expression. Writers get really attached to sentences sometimes, because of how they sound, or how they make us (the writer) feel. But one of the things you learn when you step into a writing classroom, is that your job is to serve the page. That means that no matter how amazing a sentence may be, if it doesn’t serve the page, it has to go.

I carry that ideal into my sobriety. KILL THE BABIES. It means, get rid of what isn’t working. Sometimes there’s fear around this. There’s fear of making mistakes. But when I’m in that fear I just remember what I heard when I was new: If it’s meant to be, there’s nothing you can do to fuck it up. If it’s not meant for you, there’s nothing you can do to make it work. And I’ve gone to some pretty extreme lengths to make things that weren’t meant for me, work. To my own detriment.

Self-love is about cleaning the closet. It’s about killing the babies. Because when you have more space in your life (your head, your heart) you have more opportunity for new things to flood in. God abhors a vacuum. I always loved that saying. Because killing your babies and cleaning your closets can leave you feeling a little (or very!) lonely. NEWSFLASH: Loneliness is a temporary condition.

Example: I had a couple of years sober. I was dating a LOSER (hindsight is 20/20!), but I was pretty much certain that I was going to marry him. Compulsive gambler, 14 years clean and still selling drugs. YIKES! I had really high expectations for my life, huh? Let it suffice to say that our choices in early sobriety may not always be healthy. See, this choice I was making with this person was feeding my self-loathing, not my self-love. Furthermore, the extent to which I was willing to go on a regular basis to make this very unworkable relationship work, was self-loathing in action. Of course, I didn’t know that. When it ended, I think everyone in my inner AA circle took a huge breath of relief for me. But I was devastated. And it took me a long long time to get over it. God and I really battled it out that time, over which one of us was going to be in charge. But eventually, I lost. GOD HAS A PLAN THAT’S BETTER THAN YOURS. So relax into it, if and when you can. If you can’t relax into it, work towards relaxing into it. Sit down, all the way down, and lean towards your higher power’s love for you.

One of the things I learned from that disastrous experience was that the very thing I think will make me happy, may be just the thing that kills me (or gets me arrested, or makes me miserable). And the thing I might never think would bring me happiness can be the source of my greatest joy.

It’s been a long stressful month around here, for a variety of reasons. The other night I was innocently occupying JM’s side of the bed when out of nowhere he stood in the doorway of the bathroom and starting bombing me with flying tampons. Both of us ended up in a puddle of laughter. One of the greatest gifts of my marriage is that my husband constantly reminds me to lighten up. And I really, really need that in my life.

You’ve no doubt heard this one before. Self-love and self-loathing are like the wild dogs in a fight. Which one wins? The one you feed of course. As you clean your closets over the next few weeks, as we approach the new year, look at everything in your life and ask yourself which dog it’s feeding.

For those of you who still care, the kitchen remodel is basically complete! If you’re wondering what happened to the dog or the dead squirrel, read past postings. JM and I both woke up this morning with cranky lower back pain and stiff necks, but the trauma of leaking pipes inside drywall is essentially over.

I think it’s almost prophetic that in one week my father died, I discovered a crack in the foundation of my house, and leaking pipes secretly corrupting the integrity of my kitchen wall finally overflowed. My father and I had strained relationship. It needed to change in order for me to find peace, and ultimately, that peace came when he died. I don’t understand the man. I probably never will. But I am now free to move on to obsessing about other things…like whether or not I will get into graduate school.

It would have helped had I decided to apply more than 6 weeks before the deadline. But this is kind of how I do it. I work best under pressure. Like having 9 minutes left to finish this blog post before I have to brush my hair (current status: rat’s nest) and leave for work. I think a certain amount of time pressure curbs my natural tendency to overanalyze (read: rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.) When you have 9 minutes (or 6 weeks to complete several parts of an application including a 20 page paper) you just get right to the point. Now that the kitchen is finished it’s time to knock out the rest of the application.

Are you savvy blog readers getting the drift of today’s post yet?

It’s Monday, and I love Mondays. Mondays are about moving on. They’re the new notebook of the week. They’re a brand new ‘to-do’ list (which incidentally, I totally believe can contain already done items just so that you have the immediate satisfaction of crossing things off!) Kitchen trauma over. Dead father. Grad school application. MOVE ON!

Alcoholics (and drug addicts) can make simple things really complicated–such as registering cars, getting insurance, paying tickets, returning phone calls…you get it! Sometimes, what we really need to do is just move on. That’s partly about crossing things off a list. And it’s partly about ditching the drama in favor of finding solutions that work. It’s going to be a good week this week….I can feel it!

Off to college I went. The year was 1990 and I was just shy of my 18th birthday. In spite of a treacherous final year of highschool where I was absent more than attending, I managed to wiggle my way into this private university in Florida and get a loan package to pay for it.

Part of the loan package was student employment, and my job was in the cafeteria. It required me to show up 5 days a week at 5 a.m. and slice sandwich meat and mix salad dressing for that days’ lunch crowd. I was then to return at lunch and make sandwiches out of the meat that had been sliced in the morning for the several hundred other students who did not need a loan package or a job in the cafeteria to pay for their college education.

It wasn’t that I had anything against working. Those of you who know me will attest to the fact that if there’s anything I believe in…it’s hard work. It’s just that I thought (and I have thought many many times since then, even well into sobriety) that I deserved to be doing something a little more important and little less naaaaasty. That’s my grandiosity talking.

Each morning when that alarm would go off at 4:47 a.m., I’d roll out of bed (if I happened to have gone to bed) slip into my Chuck Taylors, and roll out to the cafeteria looking like death warmed over. I would stand behind that counter at the meat slicer with all the smells of salami and mustard, mayonnaise and ham, pickles and onions, and my hangover and I would burn inside with resentment.

To be completely disclosing, there were a lot of things going on with me at the time. My mother had recently attempted suicide. I was deeply entrenched in my addiction. And there was no way that I was going to be able to consistently show up for anything…even a job. But among the other things I was seriously lacking at the time in my life, I could have used a good dose of humility.

Humility, I have learned, gets a bad rap in our world. There’s this idea that it means we have to lower ourselves, or quiet our beliefs. In fact, the real concept of humility is quite opposite. It’s about being right-sized and finding our place as a worker among workers; a friend among friends.

It was hard for me to make sandwiches for kids who came through that line at lunch time. I judged each one of them as having it better than I did. It was equally hard to show up anywhere at 5 in the morning when you’ve been drinking all night. That’s just a natural result of being an alcoholic. So I stopped going to the job. (At the same time, I also stopped attending class regularly.) And I waited for them to kick me out…which they did, promptly.

My solutions have always been worse than my problems. That’s the rub of an alcoholic mind. Humility battles that. It lets other ideas into the picture. It allows me to ask for help. Run something by you before I make a decision that might negatively impact me. It lets me see you as human, and myself as human, and us both as children of a loving God beyond our understanding who is busy at work in our lives. One of the greatest experiences in my sobriety has been learning that I can be happy being one among you. It’s just another way that we do this thing together.

Jesse: “Sure Olivia. She’ll marry a doctor. She’ll live in a big house. She’ll wear a huge rock on her finger. She’ll drive a nice Mercedes. But his eye will wander. He’ll start dating nurses. She’ll become an alcoholic and get addicted to antidepressants. And all because she settled for being a trophy wife and refused to grow. She refused to work on developing her own identity. Are you sure this is what you want?”

That’s what 14 years sobriety (JM’s sobriety) and gender class will get you. A new perspective and the power to articulate it!

Happy Saturday! Now get your butt out of bed because it’s time for the Saturday Morning Superpower Archives where we make our spiritual toolkit look like superpowers. Go ahead, take a minute to put on your cape.

I talk to a lot of newer sober people (and a lot of not so new sober people) who seem to have this impression that the steps are something we do once in Alcoholics Anonymous, or something we do once a year, or something we do when the proverbial ‘you know what’ hits the fan.

I understand that mentality. When I got here I sat down with my notebook, my pen, my sponsor, and my long mental list of resentments and I got ready to dive into the action of cleaning up the wreckage of my using life. But for me, it was like a homework assignment. I did it to the best of my ability, but I did it with the mentality that I needed to get through it so that I could get on with (or get back to) all of the really important things I had going on when I got here (read: doing lines in my closet, cleaning up spilled box wine from its tipped over position on the floor next to the bed, avoiding men with handcuffs in dark black uniforms and squad cars, and finding my way home after accidentally arriving in other states with random people I didn’t know.)

It took a while for me to get the jist of how the steps were going to be working in my life. The understanding came from people saying things like, “Sit all the way down in A.A.” and “We don’t work the steps, they work us.” In other words, as Victor Frankl says in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, I started to realize that it didn’t really matter what I expected from (sobriety–he says life), it mattered what sobriety expected from me. Because of many very strong & wise women who grabbed a hold of me in my early sober days and held on, I learned to stop waxing on about the randomness of life and instead grab onto the specifics of action. It wasn’t, how do I feel, but it was, what can I do about how I feel.

A lot of people have stories about how nice their sponsors were to them when they got here. That’s my story too–sort of. I mean they said a lot of nasty things to me.

~Sit in the front of the room because you have a hearing problem.

~Oh honey, no one really cares what you think.

~Shut up and listen; your feelings are irrelevant.

~I don’t have time for this (referring to me opening my mouth), I’m busy. I have a life. Why don’t you open up the Big Book and read pg. (whatever) and then call me back.

~No honey, I don’t call you. You have to call me. I don’t want what you have.

~ Sweetie, in Alcoholics Anonymous we don’t wear the same dirty overalls every day. We don’t talk like a truck driver. We wear a dress when we get behind the podium. Get some respect for yourself.

Uhhhh…..ok, well, that’s a tall order, but let me see what I can do since I haven’t seen a dress in like 7 years.

Anyway, the point is (and I’m going back to Frankl here for a minute) “Our answers must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems.”

That’s what the steps do. They provide a path to connect with a power greater than ourselves by assessing where we’re at, what messes we’ve made, how we can begin to clear away the wreckage and then humbly ask what it is that life (or sobriety) wants from us.

If your notebook has been on the shelf for a while and you’ve been moving along in cruise control, it might be time to shake the dust off. Keeping recovery in the center of our life is about more than going to a lot of meetings. It’s about how we think, how we act, and how we engage with life itself. Sit all the way down, and have an amazing day!